Balenciaga’s 1950s baby-doll dress. Courtesy Balenciaga Archives Balenciaga head designer Nicolas Ghesquière just ended his fifteen-year stint to be replaced by Alexander Wang, who could, says The Guardian, take the brand into a more “mass market” and less “elitist” direction. One wonders if Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895–1972)—the master craftsman who didn’t even know from “brands,” and […]
Critics who set out to write about popular culture for the general reader will almost certainly have a tough time of it. Determining exactly who that reader is seems a Sisyphean struggle: How well versed is she in media studies? Is she prepared to forgo television and Facebook in order to read about their grander implications?
A page of exercises from a Vere Foster copybook, first published in 1865. In the town of Spring Grove, Pennsylvania, set among hills and dairy farms two hours’ drive from Washington, DC, a sulfurous odor hangs in the air. It smells like ten thousand vats of cooking cabbage. It permeates everything. This is the not-so-sweet […]
Salvatore Scarpitta, Sun Dial for Racing, 1962, resin, canvas, aluminum paper, and flex tubing, 89 1/4 x 72 1/2 x 5 1/2″. THAT THE RACE CAR is at the center of Salvatore Scarpitta’s art is hardly surprising, since in life he was perpetually in motion: He was born in New York but grew up in […]
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Though he’s primarily associated with sad-suited midcentury businessmen, Dale Carnegie, who frequently aired his boredom with traditional career hierarchies and hymned his devotion to the power of personality, seems more like a precursor to many a modern tech entrepreneur. Hard labor, Carnegie argued, is less a path to success than fresh ideas are. Old models are to be questioned, then modified or thrown out completely. As Steven Watts suggests in his new biography, Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America (Other Press, $30), the conventional-wisdom business guru presaged many of the bedrock concepts of the information economy.
Dan Brown’s new thriller takes its title from the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy. While that epic poem and its author’s native Florence provide the novel with its geographic, aesthetic, and literary backdrop, a less-celebrated work bears equally upon the narrative’s thread. Brown might just as well have titled his book The Principle of Population, in homage to early-nineteenth-century demographer Thomas Robert Malthus, whose polemical theories on world population spur the machinations of Brown’s bad guy, Bertrand Zobrist. A kind of mad genetic scientist, Zobrist is hell-bent (quite literally) on curbing the planet’s exponentially growing population. He hatches a
What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter’s pellucid first novel, “The Apartment,” it may be simply the length of a day
To say that Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel is a remake of Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan is not inaccurate, but this only begins to crack open the book. Like the Emily Brontë classic, Mizumura’s novel follows an impoverished boy who is haunted by his impossible love for a wealthy but wild girl, and who tries to heal himself by amassing a suspect fortune. But while Brontë wrote at a time when the novel was still a relatively new art form—young enough to be shimmering invention—Mizumura is writing in the dying light. This book, oddly compelling in its confluence
Aspiring essayists tend to worship at the altar of Joan Didion. Her lyrical prose—with its rhythmic repetitions, its dramatic expressions of regret and longing caught in lockstep with the failings and farces of our culture—lures readers into a state of deeply romantic woe. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion writes in The White Album—a not-so-subtle suggestion to young writers that it isn’t merely important for them to spin their angst into dense, poetic passages; it’s necessary for their survival. In Didion’s hands, we are exquisitely aware of every tragic molecule that makes up our vast, bewildering universe.
Stained-glass facade of the Horn & Hardart Automat, New York. I have always been inordinately fond of things with moving parts—pinball machines, record players, those clocks and watches in which you can see the gears and sprockets turning as the seconds tick away. As such, one of my great regrets in life is that I […]
Some reasonable responses to sensing there’s a tiger in your house: calling the police, climbing out the window, realizing you’re probably imagining things and going back to sleep. Ruth Field, the elderly protagonist of Fiona McFarlane’s stunning debut novel, The Night Guest, does none of the above. Instead, she telephones her son in New Zealand (Ruth lives on a beach north of Sydney), gets out of bed, calls out in the night, and pictures the headlines that could soon convey news of her death: “Australian Woman Eaten by Tiger in Own House,” or, more salaciously, “Tiger Puts Pensioner on the
When mass demonstrations began erupting throughout the towns and cities of Egypt three years ago, there seemed to be no author more inappropriate to the moment than the late Albert Cossery. A legendary advocate of idleness and enervation, his writing felt totally at odds with the energy and euphoria of the protests on Tahrir Square. “Reading his novels amid the exhilaration of the uprising, Cossery seemed irrelevant or, happily, wrong,” reflects Anna Della Subin, who found herself in Cairo that winter with a pile of old, dusty copies of his books. And yet, that was more or less the exact
Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts.
In July at the Manchester International Festival, I saw a preview of Matthew Barney’s seven-part film opera River of Fundament. Barney explained that Norman Mailer, before he died, challenged him to adapt his 1983 novel Ancient Evenings, which he felt to be his most misunderstood and unjustly loathed work (“a muddle of incest and strange oaths,” James Wolcott wrote in Harper’s, “reducing everything to lewd, godly bestial grunts”). Barney admitted that it was a book he both loved and hated. In 1999 Mailer had acted in Barney’s Cremaster 2 as Harry Houdini, by family legend the grandfather of Gary Gilmore,
What is it about writing with no chapters and no paragraph breaks that is so intimidating? Why do we miss those gaps of white space on a page when they aren’t there: those little tabs at the beginning of a paragraph, the textless paper at the end of a chapter? No matter how big a Faulkner or Thomas Bernhard fan you are, it’s somehow never a welcoming sight to open a new book to find (gulp) an unbroken wall of text waiting for you.
Hilton Als, a theater critic at the New Yorker for the past eleven years, knows how to make an entrance. The thirteen essays collected in White Girls—the long-awaited follow-up to his book The Women (1996)—all jump off spectacularly. His lead sentence for “White Noise,” on Eminem: “It’s outrageous, this white boy not a white boy, this nasal sounding harridan hurling words at Church and State backed by a 4/4 beat.” The opening lines from “You and What Army?,” told from the perspective of Richard Pryor’s older sister: “Some famous people get cancer. That’s a look.”
James Franco, America’s most no-no-notorious grad student, now delivers what they say is a novel. It’s called Actors Anonymous (Little A/New Harvest, $26), and it comes to us from New Harvest, an imprint of Amazon, so don’t look for it at Barnes & Noble. (New Harvest sounds like an autumn-themed feminine-hygiene product. So refreshing, yet so . . . leafy?)
The germ of Gary Shteyngart’s honest, poignant, hilarious new memoir, Little Failure, was planted in 1996, when he was a recent college graduate, living in Manhattan with “a ponytail, a small substance-abuse problem, and a hemp pin on his cardboard tie,” his novelist dreams still out in front of him. Browsing at the Strand Annex during his office-job lunch hour, he came across an enormous coffee-table book called St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars. He had a sudden, severe panic attack when he saw the photo of the pink Chesme Church on page 90; he had lived nearby as a
Writers and most other people without real jobs spend most of their work time not actually creating things but either “making bad work for hire” or “burning with envy.” Our tabloid culture encourages this. Lena Dunham and Tina Fey and Hoda Kotb and whichever German teen or war-on-terror combatant was most recently held captive in a basement have all received bazillion-dollar book advances, and that is so unfair! How could capitalism work that way, that some product that is worth a lot of money would then be purchased for a lot of money to make a corporation a lot more
